Study: Analytics & Data Science Leaders Outlook in India – 2017

With Analytics Leaders outlook study, we aim to get a pulse of overall sentiment around analytics and data science industry in India. Sentiment surveys are always an early indicator of how an industry is going to fare in coming years and we have been doing to this in-depth survey since last 3 years.

This year, we surveyed 47 analytics leaders; ranging from Chief Analytics Officer, head of Data Science, Director & VP’s of Analytics; extensively on how they predict their own organization on hiring plans, growth areas, strategic decisions etc.

Here are the results of the study.

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Business Confidence

All respondents expect the demand of Analytics at their organization to increase over the next 12 months. Thus, the sentiment outlook within the industry continues to be at a high. This result is consistent from last year.

Next, we asked the leaders to rate on a scale of 1-10, if they are confident on analytics being a key focus area for organizations globally over next 12 months –

36% leaders gave a perfect 10/10 score. This is lower than 47% from 2016 and consistent with 36% from 2015.

Just 1 respondent gave a score of less than 7 out of 10

Average Confidence score was 8.7/10; lower than 9.0/10 in 2016 and in-line with 2015 score of 8.6/10.

Also, we computed the Net Sentiment Score (Calculated as difference of % respondents with score of 10s & 9s and % respondents with score from 0 through 6s), at 51%.

Though this is lower than the 61% score from 2016, it is still an extremely high score by all measures.

Key Challenges

‘Unavailability of Analytics Talent’ continues to be the biggest challenge faced by Data Science Leaders in India.

66% decision makers believe that ‘Unavailability of Analytics Talent’ is the major challenge that they face. The percentage is almost same from 2016 and 2015 at 69% and 66%

45% of leaders believe that ‘Little knowledge of analytics among customers’ is a major challenge for them. This is the biggest change in challenges since last 2 years.

In 2016 & 2015, almost 60% analytics leaders claimed to face the challenge of consumers (internal or external) to not understand analytics well. The knowledge among analytics consumers has great increased in last year.

Few leaders are wary of competition; just 15% believe it’s a challenge for them (up from 12% last year).

The biggest change came in how leaders perceive the demand of analytics. Only 13% believe that analytics demand has peaked, as opposed to 4% last year.

Other challenge that Leaders spoke about this year is on lack of innovation around data science offerings in India. It has also been pointed that there is an ‘emphasis on looking good’.

Growth Area

We asked our respondent on what according to them are the biggest growth industries for analytics in next 12 months.

‘IOT / Sensor/ Predictive Maintenance’ continues to be the top area of growth in analytics. 66% respondents believe this to be the top growth area, which is in line with 2016 results of 69%.

‘Digital/ Online/ Mobile/ Social’ follows at 55%, down from 67% in 2016.

‘Big Data/ Database Management’ sees the biggest drop in outlook since last year. In 2016, 1 in 2 leaders saw this space to be a growth area. Today, just 1 in 3 analytics leaders in India expect ‘Big Data/ Database Management’ to be growth area in next 12 months.

On the contrary, ‘HR/ Talent/ People’ has increased in outlook from 20% in 2016 to 32% in 2017 as growth areas.

Key strategic decisions

We asked our respondents on the key strategy decisions that they plan for the coming year in order to grow their business.

64% analytics leaders plan to collaborate with external partners.

64% are planning to grow their existing offerings.

Just 11% plan to look for external financing in the coming year.

% of Advanced Analytics

We asked an added question, on how the analytics organizations for these leaders are composed in terms of executing advanced analytics projects. We asked our respondents the percentage of work in their organization that involves advanced analytics.

Analytics leaders claimed that in 2017, 41% of the analytics work is in the area of Advanced/ predictive analytics/ modeling. This is higher than 38% in 2016.

The biggest bucket comprised of 10-25% advanced analytics work i.e. 26% respondents claim that the percentage of advanced analytics work in their organization as compared to other analytics work is in the range of 10-25%. This is higher from 2016 of 20%.

Respondents’ Profiles

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Bhasker is a Data Science evangelist and practitioner with proven record of thought leadership and incubating analytics practices for various organizations. With over 12 years of experience in the area of Business Analytics, he is well recognized as an expert within the industry. Earlier, Bhasker worked as Vice President at Goldman Sachs. Bhasker currently advises various startups on how to utilize analytics and thinks about interesting ideas in this space in free time.
He is B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi and MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow.